3.0GHz Phenom and 3-Way CrossFire Spotted

AMD held a Technology Analyst Day in Sunnyvale, California today, where members of their management team delivered presentations related to the company's various technologies and roadmaps. There were a number of details revealed during the presentations regarding AMD's modular M-SPACE design methodology, next-generation graphics technology and CPU / GPU Fusion, and attendees were also given a glimpse into AMD's more distant future with information about Bulldozer and Bobcat; the company's next-generation desktop and mobile CPU core architectures. AMD even went so far as to say Bulldozer was 'Designed to be the highest performing single and multi-threaded compute core in history'. The presentation from today should be available later this evening at this URL should you want to dig a little deeper.

Something else on display at the Technology Analysts Day was a quad-core Phenom powered rig, complete with a 3-way Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire setup. From the looks of the rig, it's based on the same RD790 reference platformwe showed you last week. Another interesting piece of information regarding this system is that AMD revealed the clock speed of the processor, which as you can see in the second picture is 3.0GHz. There has been a lot of speculation that AMD wasn't able to push early Phenom samples to frequencies this high, but here's some proof that at least some Phenoms clocked at 3.0GHz do exist. You may also notice that the system hit a Windows Experience index score of 5.9, which incidentally is the highest score possible. We should also note that AMD talked about 4-way CrossFire as well, and that the company has continued plans to produce discreet GPUs at all performance levels (mainstream - enthusiast), even after Fusion arrives.

In case you're wondering when all of this hardware is going to arrive, AMD continues to state that the fourth quarter of this year will mark the arrival of Barcelona / Agena. The RD790 platform will arrive before the processors however and potentially 3 and 4-way CrossFire as well.